Notes Preface 1. This observation is made by Valerie Purton in IMC, p. 171. Murdoch’s letters to Suguna Ramanathan are in the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. 2. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto, 1953), p. 138. 3. Murdoch, interview with Rose, TCHF, pp. 17–18. 4. Murdoch, Under the Net (London: Chatto & Windus, [1954] 1982), p. 286. 5. Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma (London: Chatto & Windus, 1995), p. 249. Chapter 1 Early Life 1. See Yozo Moroya and Paul Hullah (eds) Poems by Iris Murdoch (Okayama: University Education Press, 1997). This is a limited edition of 500 copies. Another very short book of poetry by Murdoch is A Year of Birds, with wood engravings by Reynolds Stone (London: Chatto, 1984). Other poems have appeared in various anthologies. 2. Murdoch’s very early essays are published in Yozo Moroya and Paul Hullah (eds) Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch (Okayama: University Education Press, 1997). This is a limited edition of 500 copies. 3. Purton records that ‘meeting her on a mailboat to Dublin, Richard Hamm- ond (son of Annie Hammond, witness to IM’s parents’ wedding) asks IM what she wishes to do in her life. She replies she wants to write’ (IMC, p. 7). 4. Poems by Iris Murdoch, p. 54. 5. Yeats, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, in W.B. Yeats, The Poems (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 294. 6. See Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe, Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008). 7. Murdoch, ‘Miss Beatrice May Baker’, in Poems by Iris Murdoch, p. 90. 8 Priscilla Martin notes: ‘I read English at Somerville about twenty years later, found Miss Lascelles impossible to please and wish I too had changed to Classics.’ 9. A 22-line poem appeared there in May 1939 and in June she published a satirical polemic ‘The Irish: Are they Human?’ See Occasional Essays by Iris Murdoch, p. 12. 10. Mary Midgley interestingly recalls that (like the First World War) the situation did offer some opportunities to women, at least in wartime Oxford. There were only five women’s colleges and, until decades later when most colleges became mixed, women were heavily outnumbered by men. Proportionately there were more women in the system during 172 Notes 173 the War and men dominated the university less. Midgley also thinks that philosophy students benefited during the War years because, with the exodus of younger dons into the services, logical positivism dominated the faculty less (Mary Midgely, in conversation with Priscilla Martin). 11. Murdoch, The Red and the Green (London: Chatto & Windus, 1965), pp. 284–5. 12. Poems by Iris Murdoch, p. 70. 13. For a more detailed discussion of Murdoch’s civil servant characters, see Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London, Chapter 3, ‘Wooden Horses racing at a fair: Whitehall’, pp. 107–28. 14. It is unclear exactly how many novels were written before Under the Net. Even Murdoch’s biographer is unclear: ‘Sometimes she gave the figure of four, on one occasion six. A number were destroyed by her around 1986’ (IMAL, p. 170). One was turned down by T.S. Eliot, as we mention, and one was unfortunately called The Lady of the Bosky Gates. 15. The second article in July 1943 was a review of The Rebirth of Christianity by Stanley Cook and the third in September 1944 was a review of Worship and the Common Life by Eric Hayman. 16. See Part Four of Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds) Iris Murdoch and Morality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), which contains four ess- ays on Murdoch’s theology: ‘The Dream that Does not Cease to Haunt Us: Iris Murdoch’s Holiness’ by Anne Rowe; ‘A Story About a Man: The Demythologized Christ in the Work of Iris Murdoch and Patrick White’ by Pamela Osborn; ‘ “Do Not Seek God Outside Your Own Soul”: Buddhism in The Green Knight’ by Tammy Grimshaw and ‘The Moral Fate of Fictive Persons: On Iris Murdoch’s Humanism’ by William Schweiker. 17. For a full analysis of the links between the work of Murdoch and Simone Weil, see Gabrielle Griffin, The Influence of the Writings of Simone Weil on the Fiction of Iris Murdoch (San Francisco: Mellen Research University Press, 1993). 18. Letter to Norah Smallwood, 1 October 1953, Chatto Archive, University of Reading. 19. Letter to Norah Smallwood, 16 October 1961, Chatto Archive. 20. See the Scotsman, 30 January 1983. This tension is also discussed in the introduction to IMAR, pp. 1–12. 21. Murdoch, interview with Blow, Spectator, 25 September 1976, pp. 24–5. 22. Plato, The Statesman (London: William Heinemann, 1952), 269b–274E. 23. Murdoch alludes to Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850), Book X, lines 693–4, J.C. Maxwell (ed.) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), where the poet famously describes his initial joy at the French Revolution. Like Wordsworth, Murdoch became more conservative. 24. See Murdoch, ‘Against Dryness’ in EM, pp. 287–96. 25. Philippa Foot, in conversation with Priscilla Martin. 26. These essays are both published in EM. See pp. 43–58 and 130–45 respectively. 27. Undated letter from 1972 to Nora Smallwood, Chatto Archive. 28. John Bayley, in conversation with Priscilla Martin. 29. Letter to Ian Parsons, 16 November 1953, Chatto Archive. 30. Letter to Murdoch, 28 November 1953, Chatto Archive. 174 Notes 31. Murdoch, A Severed Head (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963), p. 13. 32. Lord David Cecil, document in Chatto Archive. 33. Times Literary Supplement, 9 September 1954, p. 437. 34. Kingsley Amis, Spectator, 11 June 1954, p. 722. Chapter 2 After the War 1. New Criticism is the technique of examining the detail of a literary work in order to define its meaning without regard to author and context. 2. Robert Conquest, New Lines (London: Macmillan, 1956), p. xv. 3. Murdoch, interview with Jeffrey Meyers, TCHF, p. 226. 4. Murdoch met the French writer in Paris in 1946. They corresponded between 1946 and 1975 and Murdoch translated Pierrot into English. In one of her letters to Queneau, Murdoch wrote ‘anything I will ever write will owe so much so much to you’. See letters from Iris Murdoch to Raymond Queneau, acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies, in the Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. In a letter to David Hicks, she says that she saw the French as ‘the real Master-Race’ (IMC, p. 36). 5. Murdoch, letter to Queneau, Murdoch Archives at Kingston University. 6. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), p. 9, hereafter SRR. 7. Murdoch’s notes from this lecture have been acquired by the Centre for Iris Murdoch Studies and are in the Murdoch archives at Kingston University. 8. See EM, pp. 287–98. 9. Quoted in SRR, p. 41. 10. Murdoch’s essays ‘The Novelist as Metaphysician’ and ‘The Existentialist Hero’ were published in the Listener in March 1950. 11. Murdoch, Under the Net (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p. 80. 12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955). 13. See SRR, p. 97. 14. Plato, The Republic vii.514A–521B, trans. F.M. Cornford (Oxford University Press, 1941). 15. Ibid: ‘A modern Plato would compare his Cave to an underground cinema, where the audience watch the play of shadows thrown by the film passing before the light at their backs’ (p. 223). 16. ‘An excessive self-forgetfulness will break down [the] the objective contours [of the work of art] and blend it with fantasy and dream [...] (It is charac- teristic of the art of the cinema to encourage, by its very form, this art of self-forgetting)’ (SRR, p. 97). 17. Murdoch herself did not bother much about make-up after her marriage. 18. Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1991), Act 1, Scene 1, line 234. 19. Neary adapts a line in Faustus’s speech on the phantasm of Helen of Troy. Dr Faustus, Tucker Brooke (ed.) (Oxford University Press, 1910), line 1334, p. 189. Notes 175 20. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London: Faber, 1988), p. 5. 21. Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 233. 22. Murdoch, ‘The Existentialist Hero’, broadcast on 6 March 1950. BBC Script T679. In EM, pp. 108–16. 23. Mary Warnock, A Memoir (London: Duckworth, 2000), p. 43. 24. See Murdoch, ‘The Idea of Perfection’ in EM, pp. 299–336. 25. Elias Canetti (1905–94) was born in Bulgaria and moved to Manchester when he was six years old. He wrote Die Blendung in 1935, which was translated as Auto-da-Fé and published in 1946. Crowds and Power appeared in 1962 and Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1981. He is present in other enchanter characters in later novels, for example, Julius King in A Fairly Honourable Defeat and Charles Arrowby in The Sea, The Sea. 26. Simone Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. A.F. Wells (London: Routledge, 1978). See Frances White, ‘“The World is just a Transit Camp”: Diaspora in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch’, Iris Murdoch Review, 2 (Kingston University Press, 2010), pp. 5–12. 27. Murdoch, The Flight from the Enchanter (1956; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1962), p. 8. 28. When Rosa reminds Camilla Wingfield of her name she says, ‘Ah, yes your mother was an absolute bolshy’ (p. 110). Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was a Polish-Jewish-German Marxist theorist, socialist philosopher and revolutionary for the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania, the German SPD, the Independent Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party of Germany. After her death, she achieved symbolic status amongst social democrats and Marxists. 29. Cheryl Bove and Anne Rowe suggest a feminist aspect to The Flight from the Enchanter in Chapter 5, “‘Wooden horses racing at a fair”: Civil Servants and Whitehall’ in Sacred Space, Beloved City: Iris Murdoch’s London (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar’s Publishing, 2008), pp.